ICE collected nearly one million DNA samples last year, including those of young children, feeding an FBI database indefinitely. This week on Wired’s Uncanny Valley, Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down the fallout of that collection, the backlash against Google Earth’s AI tool, a secretive White House cybersecurity plan, and a SpaceX rocket crashing into the moon. WIRED’s Molly Taft also discusses the strange coalition fighting data centers across the US.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young Children
- AI Influencers Are Heading Into Uncharted Territory
- The White House Is Keeping Its AI Cybersecurity Framework Secret
- AI Hacks Are Bad. AI Worms and Viruses Will Be Worse
- Welp, Nobody Saw SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Rocket Crash Into the Moon
- How Data Centers Broke American Politics
You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger, and Molly Taft on Bluesky @mollytaft.com. Write to us at [email protected].
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Zoe Schiffer: Welcome to Wired’s Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoe Schiffer, contributing editor.
Brian Barrett: I’m Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Leah Feiger: And I’m Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.
Brian Barrett: Today on the show, we’re talking about how the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, better known as ICE, has been collecting DNA samples at an alarming rate. These samples have led to hundreds of thousands of people, including young children, to end up in an FBI criminal database basically forever.
Zoe Schiffer: We’ll also get into one of our favorite topics, AI slop. From Google Earth disabling its new AI tool after people used it to create fake maps, to Substack partnering with the AI writing detection tool Pangram, companies are starting to realize that people really don’t like low-quality AI content flooding their feeds.
Leah Feiger: Also in the realm of AI, the White House announced a plan to tackle the increasing security risks brought on by AI companies. It’s keeping the details mostly under wraps, but we’re going to discuss what’s behind all the secrecy and what this could mean for future regulation.
Brian Barrett: We’ll also talk about how part of a SpaceX rocket crashed into the moon, leaving a new crater behind and all kinds of questions.
Leah Feiger: And later in the show, Wired senior writer Molly Taft joins to tell us all about how data centers have officially broken US politics.
Brian Barrett: Well, to start off, let’s talk about ICE, which we haven’t in a little bit, but they’re still there. They’re still doing bad things, including collecting DNA samples. Wired’s Dhruv Mehrotra reported this week about how ICE has collected nearly 1 million people’s DNA this past year, just this past year alone, including that of young children. As we mentioned up top, this DNA collection has led to hundreds of thousands of people with no criminal convictions ending up in an FBI database indefinitely. And in fact, the Department of Homeland Security has become the single largest source of new profiles in this database.
Leah Feiger: I feel like we’re getting inundated with here’s one more part of your privacy, here’s one more part of security, here’s one more bit of immigrants being treated as subhuman. But this one, at least enough for me, broke through the noise. Don’t you guys think? This was wild.
Zoe Schiffer: I feel like I have a question before we move forward, which is maybe one that’s shared by listeners. Why is DNA being collected from immigrants in the first place? This surprised me, and maybe I’m a little naïve about what they’re subjected to when they’re in this country.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is because they can. And I wish that we’re more nuanced or subtle than that, but I think they are just trying to gather as much information as they can at all times. I want to be clear too, these are not people with criminal convictions, people who are even necessarily suspected of a crime. It is just such a wide net that they are casting. In fact, internal training materials that drove, in partnership with researchers at Georgetown, we should say, dug up, said that asylum seekers and refugees who have not adjusted their immigration status must have their DNA sampled and that the DNA needs to be collected after any arrest. It is just table stakes for these officers to grab DNA whenever and wherever they can.
Leah Feiger: And already a lot of lawmakers have been speaking out against this. For example, when learning that children were being swabbed at a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, a number of representatives said in a joint statement to Wired, none of the families at Dilley have been convicted of a crime. They do not belong in a database meant for violent criminals, especially children. This is starting to pick up steam across the board. I think that we’ve just gotten so used to the idea that the government is allowed to collect any information it wants, store it in whichever way it wants. And all of these norms have been destroyed in the last year and a half. It’s really shocking, honestly.
Zoe Schiffer: So you’re saying basically that refusing to allow your DNA to be collected can become its own chart, can become a mark on your record regardless of what you had previously.
Brian Barrett: Not only a mark on your record. Wired and Dhruv identified two prosecutions filed in 2025 against people in immigration custody who refused DNA collection. It is becoming a crime to say, “I don’t want you to do that.” That’s one thing. Then the other thing too that I think we’ve mentioned, but I want to dig into a little bit, is that they have started recently… I think the shift to collecting DNA from families is also relatively new. And we’re talking about, I think the official line is that kids as young as 14 can have their DNA collected, but Georgetown and Wired identified 492 children under 14 whose DNA the agency sent to the FBI, not just collected, but sent onto the FBI between January 2025 and January 2026. That included 21 5-year-olds, 32 6-year-olds, 33 7-year-olds who are now in an FBI DNA database for the rest of their lives.
Leah Feiger: I mean, the kicker to me here too, part of this has to do with “preventing future crime.” It’s all supposed to be about how the primary purpose is to build a national DNA database for solving crimes, which is a theory. OK, sure. Solving crimes, cool about that. But these are 5-year-olds. These are 5-year-olds whose—so many of their rights have already been taken away by this current administration and DOJ and DHS. To have that as an additional marker to me is a really important visual next step of the war on immigrants at this moment in the country.
Zoe Schiffer: All right. I’m going to take us from the depths of despair. Just drag us up.
Brian Barrett: Some would say AI slop is maybe not the depths, but we’re definitely still in despair territory.
Leah Feiger: I mean, I love the depths of despair, my favorite place to be.
Zoe Schiffer: I find it funny, but I have a bunch of thoughts on it and my views on this have been evolving really rapidly, so I’m excited to talk to you about it.
Leah Feiger: Good, good, good, good.
Zoe Schiffer: Last week, Google rolled out a new AI feature on Google Earth, which would basically let anyone zoom into real coordinates on a map and type a prompt just like you would in ChatGPT or Gemini and superimpose an AI scene on top of real Google satellite imagery.
Brian Barrett: What could go wrong?
Zoe Schiffer: Yeah, I have a hard time imagining how no one during this process said, “This is a terrible idea,” or perhaps they did and they were not listened to. But regardless, Google did this. As you might imagine, it took 24 hours for people to generate fabricated nuclear plants in Iran, a bombed hospital in Gaza, and fires at an Iranian oil terminal. People were extremely upset about this for misinformation, disinformation, and other reasons, and Google quickly disabled the feature. It just feels like there is a real split between how Silicon Valley feels about AI and uses AI and how the rest of the country feels about it and uses about it because these tools are pretty unpopular, even as they’re being widely adopted. But I think that the way that they’re adopted is also really different. Most people are using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude as basically a replacement for Google. Whereas in Silicon Valley, they’re using it as a replacement for a personal assistant or a junior employee. And so for them, I think there is real magic in the tools and the capabilities. But for everyone else, the thing you hear a lot is why is this being shoved down our throats? We don’t want this. They’re stuffing AI features in all of these apps that we previously used and were good and the AI features are bad.
Brian Barrett: Well, I think it’s AI slop specifically, right? Yeah, there are use cases for AI agents. Zoe, you’ve given over some percentage of your life to them already. It’s working out great for you. But what I find interesting about this is, A, how quickly they rolled it back, and B, it’s just the latest in a series of steps like this where companies that have been sort of embracing AI up to this point are acknowledging through actual feature changes to their products that, hey, maybe people don’t like this. Just in the last week or so, you had LinkedIn adding a little button to a post where you can say, “I think this looks like AI slop. I don’t like this.” LinkedIn, which has basically been a platform that has been built the last year or so on saying, “Hey, look at all the AI slop you can make on this platform.” That’s their whole thing.
Zoe Schiffer: Love AI slop.
Brian Barrett: But now they’re saying, OK, we can actually give people a chance to say no. You had
